When Amazon made their move to create Twitch Prime (in what I called the best marketing move of all time), they had all the data – cross usage rates, demographics, subscription rates, etc. Now as we look from the outside, particularly as we’ve developed a number of alternate hypothesis, can we see and evaluate the success of the program?
As outsiders, while we don’t have direct access to the data, there are a number of point we can observe.
Market Embrace
Amazon is leveraging market forces, expecting that the benefits to streamers and viewers are enough to drive adoption. We can watch what streamers do to see if they are seeing the benefits. If Twitch Prime is creating value for them in the form of incremental subscribers, successful streamers should be heavily promoting it to their viewers.
We can certainly see some adoption today in on-stream pitches, stream titles, channel pages and social media mentions.
At the moment, I would hypothesize that there is a lot of excitement over Twitch Prime so current promotions aren’t necessarily market tested. The real proof will be in a month or two to see how normalized the messaging becomes.
We can also watch what Amazon does. They may opt to drop or modify the program if it isn’t delivering the results they are looking for.
Increased Viewers
It is a few steps away, but we could predict that because of Twitch Prime, more people participate on the platform, driving incremental views. Similarly, if viewers subscribe to more channels, they are more likely to regularly watch more, boosting total hours watched and views.
Total views and current viewers are the only numbers available, but watching them over time may provide some insight into overall platform growth thought there are many non-Prime factors impacting these metrics.
Watching Chat Participants
Twitch provides a chat interface where viewers interact with each-other and the streamer. A couple of features of the chat makes it worth watching. Users have “badges” that indicate if they are Prime Members, Subscribers, Moderators and a number of statuses. When viewers subscribe, a message is also sent to the chat.
What to look at in the example –
- Sirlexon – the ‘POW’ is the badge that indicates subscribers while the crown indicates Prime members
- You can see that Bline_Ophtalmologist subscribed using Twitch Prime
- EQWashu has a sword that indicates they are a moderator
- Franch1s3 has no badges
What this means is that we can test our hypothesis by counting users in the twitch chat to see how many users are subscribers and/or Prime members.